The Seventh Annual Emoti-Con! NYC Youth Digital Media & Technology Challenge was held on May 30, and it was an amazing day for NYC makers, tinkerers, and inventors!

Nearly 300 youth and educators from organizations including Mouse,Global Kids, EVC, Brooklyn College Community Partnership,Lower Eastside Girls Club, NYPL, Urban Arts Partnership,Computer Resource Centers: NYC Parks, Divas for Social Justice, Parsons, the New School for Design, ScriptEd, and Teen Art Salon brought an incredible array of projects to the Bartos Forum at the Fifth Avenue New York Public Library.

This year’s Emoti-Con featured some BRAND NEW, AWESOME opportunities:

• Hive NYC hosted an Opportunities table to let youth know about places where they can keep making over the summer.
• Attendees got the chance to sit down with professionals and learn everything they could about topics like Using Technology to Change the World, Turning Your Idea into a Business, and Code Innovation.
• All youth got to enter a raffle that gave them the chance to win a Nintendo DS, a free class at Parson’s Pre-College Program or a Google Chromebook!

We were also lucky to have an amazing array of keynote speakers for the day, including:

• Minerva Tantoco, the CTO of the Mayor’s Office of Tech & Innovation who talked about how she’s helping NYC become one of the best cities for makers and innovators in the country;
• Iltimas Doha, a young designer of wearable technology at EYEBEAM, who inspired us to take on challenges in our communities and address social issues with technology; and
• Arlene Ducao, chief at DuKode/DuKorp and inventor of MindRider, a mind-mapping helmet system.

Check out the Emoti-Con! website to read more about these awesome speakers, and our incredible panel of competition judges!

Besides awesome speakers and amazing learning opportunities, students from around the city used the Emoti-Con Project Fair as a chance to show off their amazing digital media and technology projects to their peers and professionals in the field! There were so many amazing projects that the judges had a hard time choosing winners.

There were lots of Mouse projects featured in the Project Fair:

The Baruch Tech Team (Baruch College Campus High School)
This Squad from Manhattan’s Flatiron District presented not one...not two...but FIVE awesome tech projects the fair! Their amazing work included an app for their fellow students, a bluetooth glove, a recycle bin that counts the number of bottles thrown in, an electronic school planner, and a DIY light-clip to encourage pedestrian street safety. WHEW! So much great work from one school!

BCAM ROARS Squad (Brooklyn Community Arts & Media High School)Teen game designers from this brilliant Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn squad presented HellSoul, a game they made in which players jump through obstacle courses while destroying enemies!

Gateway Mouse Squad (P256Q Gateway Academy)
Anthony from this Rockaway, Queens Mouse Squad, presented his iBook iCover All You Wanted to Know About Apple. The all-encompassing guide includes galleries, video, interactive photos and more. It was specially designed to be useful for all skill levels and all kinds of learners!

Mouse Corps
This year's Mouse Corps group presented four amazing assistive technology projects, all designed to support users who have cerebral palsy. They partnered with members of United Cerebral Palsy to design and prototype Artillo, a digital drawing tool within a soft pillow, designed for people with limited physical ability; Game-Ability, a series of video game controllers designed to help a variety of users with a variety of physical abilities play games together; Joy to the Key, a modified/adapted joystick that interacts with digital keyboard software to help people with limited mobility type and use a mouse; and Shoe-levator, which helps people with limited mobility put on their shoes more easily.

Artillo was chosen as one of five finalists for the Urban Arts Partnership’s Smartbomb Labs Fellowship, which helps innovative high schoolers develop their arts and technology projects further by providing free lab time, resources, and support from experts. Congrats Artillo Team!!!

MORE Winners!

In addition to these awesome Mouse projects, there were amazing presentations from other young tech geeks:

• EVC New Media Arts High School Apprentices won the award for Most Social Impact for their project, Bridging the Gap, a transmedia project with a goal of bridging the gap between the community and police.
###liM.S. 88 >strong###Design Team won Best Pitch for their presentation of design solutions for environmental problems at their school.
• Lower Eastside Girls Club won the award for Most Innovative project for Coderpillar, a model for a staircase at the Lower Eastside Girls Club that includes LED lights, sensors, and sounds.
• A Global Kids project called Squad Up: Finding Kathy won the Point-of-View award. This is a geo-located game in which players help a young woman who is trying to get out of a gang.
• Last, but not least, Julia from Parsons Pre-College Academy won both the Most Entertaining and Audience Choice awards for her project, Elating Emotions, which used digital media to create designs of personal positive emotions!

To find out more about what it's like to bring a project to Emoti-con!, check out this great video by Global Kids leader, Neha Gautam!

Awesome work everyone!

Congratulations to all the amazing makers who joined us this year for the biggest Emoti-Con ever! Hope to see YOU there next year!